Tuesday, November 13, 2007

the tagline for the TED website. And it's good to see a tagline with truth.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 150 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Ted is a goldmine of ideas and information. For instance, below I've embedded the TED video of a talk by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte about the One Laptop Per Child project.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

The Sunrise project has presented engineers with a number of extraordinary challenges. The balloon is designed to carry 6,000 pounds of equipment, including a 1-meter (39-inch) solar telescope, additional observing instruments, communications equipment, computers and disk drives, solar panels, and roll cages and crush pads to protect the payload on landing. The equipment must be able to withstand dramatic changes in temperature, and the steel and aluminum gondola cannot vibrate in ways that could interfere with the operation of the telescope.

6,000 pounds! This is the future of space travel. Who needs rocket science? *I found this via Sci Fi Tech.

Michael Geist, author of the weekly column 'Law Bytes,' made the concluding remarks at the recent (end of September, 2007) International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner's conference in Montreal. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has posted a video of those remarks on youtube.

Geist has been following the efforts of the Harper "government" [sarcastic quote marks inserted by me] to introduce "lawful access" legislation to Canada. The aim of lawful access appears to be to eradicate any notion or illusion of privacy we hold as citizens by giving law enforcement agencies to listen to any phone call and to requisition any and all data on the activities any ISP's subscribers with one phone call to the ISP. Here is a partial list of entries on Geist's site which deal with lawful access.

Watch the video, read up on lawful access. Help find a way to stop this erosion of our rights as Canadian citizens. Booting Harper and his Bush-licking conservatives out of office would be a good way to start.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Bradbury makes some good points. Personally, I think that the best thing that could happen to the Orioles would be for owner Peter Angelos to take a long walk off a short Baltimore pier, or at least sell the club to someone who is interested in fielding a winning team.

Why pick on Angelos?

Well, first of all he's a lawyer. Beyond that, Angelos is responsible for hiring the mismanagement team who put together the overpriced "major league team" that currently constitutes the Orioles. A glance at some of the contracts that comprise the poorly constructed roster can be found here. Until top-level management begins to make sensible (don't even hope for inspired) roster decsions, the O's will continue to lose no matter how many field managers they fire.

Update: It appears there's also been an upper-management shakeup in Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun reports that the Orioles have hired Andy MacPhail as their new Chief Operating Officer. Looks good on paper, as MacPhail presided over two World Series winners in Minnesota (1987 and 1991). However, it should be pointed out that MacPhail inherited the '87 Twins team and that the '91 Twins might reasonably be called a fluke.

MacPhail also spent much of the past 10 years as president of the Chicago Cubs during which time the Cubs' roster construction and player management has been questionable to say the least. How much of the blame for the above is on MacPhail's head is not clear.

Looks like Angelos is actually trying to do something to get the O's moving in the right direction. We'll have to wait and see how MacPhail pans out, though I'm not optimistic about his ability. Off the top of my head I'd have to say that with this hiring Peter Angelos is in the right church, but the wrong pew.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Here's a poem I wrote last Friday. Anyone who is familiar with my stuff will probably notice that this one tumbles among my apparent obsessions like a pebble in a streambed.

Frost-Damaged Sonnet (near the end of a long, cold May)

Some June when lilacs aren't in bloomand willows are bare of bark,when there's no chickadee, no bumblebee,no baseball’s parabolic arc,when lips and tongues aren't amongthe universe's graces,and gravity and entropyfinally erase us

may this mind of mine be left to findthe equations of her beautyin echoes of her hands’ and thighs’ collapse to singularity —all curvature of Space definedin the ache of eyesfor the sway her hips impart to Time.

Friday, May 04, 2007

A month into the 2007 baseball season the most interesting story to me is that of the injury-wracked Oakland Athletics team. So far this year, they've suffered injuries of various sorts to Rich Harden (their best starting pitcher), Mark Kotsay (their best center fielder), Milton Bradley (their best right fielder), Dan Johnson (their second-best first baseman -- though he's back now), Nick Swisher (their best left fielder and best first baseman), Mike Piazza (their best designated hitter and back-up catcher), Esteban Loaiza (their #4 starting pitcher) Adam Melhuse (another back-up catcher), Bobby Kielty (fourth outfielder) and Travis Buck (a Triple A outfielder) who performed well as an emergency call-up pressed into everyday duty.

In spite of all this, the A's have a 13-14 record and are holding down third in the AL West, a mere 2 games back of the division-leading Angels.

How are they doing it? Well, Dan Haren and Joe Blanton have looked great leading the rotation in the absence of Harden, and Chad Gaudin has done everything that was expected from Loaiza while Joe Kennedy has been serviceable at the back of the rotation (fortunately the schedule through April left little need for a fifth starter). And the bullpen has been strong. Yep, they've been doing it with pitching.

Their bats have sucked. It's been all ass-bats (a fine word coined by BatGirl) all the time. Which isn't surprizing considering the line-up flux -- must be tough to get an offense going when the components change on an almost nightly basis.

Through all this, Billy Beane, Oakland's GM, has never stopped trying to improve his team, for now and for the future. In the last few weeks, he's traded minor leaguers for Chris Denorfia (a fourth outfielder type who's out for the season -- and was at the time of the trade, he's a player for next year), and Ryan Langerhans, a good defensive outfielder and league-average hitter who can play all 3 OF positions well. Then Beane turned around and traded Langerhans to Washington for Chris "Doyle" Snelling, a good hitter and better than average defensive outfielder with a reputation for being injury-prone who was languishing on the Nationals' bench while lesser players started everyday (don't ask why he was sitting -- you can't know the mind of a squid). After the Snelling trade and the Piazza injury, Beane traded a player-to-be-named later (or cash) to the Orioles for minor league walking fiend, Jack Cust, a classic three-true-outcomes hitter with no defensive upside -- he's fit only for DHing.

I don't expect Snelling or Cust to be in the A's lineup all season, but I do think they'll be useful parts when they do play.

At The Hardball Times, Jeff Sackmann has an interesting article on Billy Beane and whether he's discovered a new baseball inefficiency to exploit. Whether or not Beane has found a new strategy is a fascinating question -- certainly most of his recent signings and trades seem to point that way. Other interesting (though perhaps moot) questions if the strategy exists are whether or not Beane consciously developed and pursued it, or if it is something he stumbled into while dealing with his team's injuries over the last few seasons and found a way to make work for him. Two things do seem certain to me: Beane shows no fear, and he is the most fascinating GM in sports.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

I'd call its original form an unintentional prose poem, but I've taken the liberty of inserting line breaks and doing some editing to turn it into the following (which I may attempt to record sometime in the next few days):

Found Poem (How To Catch a Lion in the Sahara Desert)

1. Theoretical Physics Methods

The Dirac method

Assert that wild lions canipso facto not be observedin the Sahara desert.

Therefore,if there are any lions at allin the desert, they are tame.

The capture of a tame lion is leftas an exercise for the reader.

The Schrödinger method

At every instant there isa non-zero probabilityof the lion being in the cage.

Sit and wait.

The Quantum Measurement method

Assume that the sex of the lionis ab initio indeterminate.

The wave function for the lionis hence a superposition

of the gender eigenstatefor a lion and that for a lioness.

Lay these eigenstates out flaton the ground and orthogonal

to each other. Since the (male)lion has a distinctive mane,

the measurement of sex cansafely be made from a distance,

using binoculars. Because the observeraffects the observed the lion then collapses

into one of the eigenstates, whichis rolled up and placed inside the cage.

The Nuclear Physics method

Insert a tame lion into the cageand apply a Majorana exchangeoperator on it and a wild lion.

As a variant assumeyou would like to catch(for argument's sake) a male lion:

Just last week, he said, the funeral home negotiated with an internet service provider in New Zealand to upgrade one woman's connection temporarily to high-speed broadband so that she could see her sister's funeral without freezing screens or dropped audio.

Not just anybody can log on to eavesdrop on the grief. The service requires special software downloads and password access controlled by Clarke & Son [sic].

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Call me a geek if you like, but I think this is a seriously cool DIY project. Though if I were to attempt it, I'd probably not even bother looking for an old typewriter to salvage keys from. I'd simply go with the brass-edged buttons for all the keys. Also, while it would be much more work (all those holes!), I think I might at least attempt to make a thin brass or wooden face to lay over or in place of the felt.

There is humble servant, a somewhat frequent and very thoughtful commenter on this blog.

And now there is The Chicago Homer, a great resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek Literature

"The Chicago Homer is a bilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. Its component parts are

1. Standard electronic editions of the texts, revised for maximum utility in a searchable database, and translations by Richmond Lattimore and Daryl Hine that closely observe the line structure of the originals and lend themselves to interlinear display.

2. A set of database tables that support lexical, phrasal, morphological, and narratological searches.

3. A Web-based user interface that gives access to the texts and supports queries to the database.

The most salient feature of the Chicago Homer is its ability to make visible the network of phrasal repetition that is so distinctive a feature of Homeric poetry. We reserve the rest of this introduction to a brief discussion of repetitions before turning to a detailed account of the texts and translation, the database and its parts, and the user interface."

I believe I will be making some use of The Chicago Homer in both the near and the distant future.

Maybe many of you folks have read this book already. And if you haven't, maybe you should (I find Jaynes' writing very accessible). I managed to borrow a copy a little while ago (but it's apparent to me that I am going to have to acquire my own copy to have available at my leisure). I cracked it open Friday night at work, and can't stop. The idea, if you're unfamiliar with the book, is that what we call consciousness (that is, the subjective "I" we imagine behind our eyes and everyone else's) emerged as a result of language (and specifically through the heightened attention, examination, and comparison we are able to achieve through proliferations and permutations of metaphor) and that before the "I" the mind was bicameral.

What Jaynes meant (or seems to have meant [he died in 1997] — I haven't finished the book yet, or managed to fully absorb or understand the chapters I've read) by bicameral is that the mind functioned as two parts — and neither part conscious — the "man" part, based in the left side of the brain and using, as we do, Wernicke's area to communicate through language, which performed everyday tasks such as learning, fulfilling social/civic/ familial obligations, everything that needed to be done on a day-to-day basis, and the "god" part, based in the right side of the brain, which performed organizational and analytical tasks, and which, in times of stress or decision (i.e. novel situations) collated/parsed/synthesized past experience, formed a response, and, using the area equivalent to Wernicke's, coded that response into speech and sent it to the left side of the brain where it was perceived as the voice of the god (or the king, chief, or a parent), this hallucination being auditory, but often accompanied by corresponding visual hallucinations.

Jaynes wasn't just pulling this stuff out of his ass. He develops his thesis slowly and carefully, with great attention to detail (and objections), citing, for example, much research done on, and case histories of epileptics and schizophrenics.

Part of Jaynes' ideas are expressed through a study of the absence of subjectivity and volition in the Iliad — the Iliad as a psychological document is, or seems to me to be, quite central to the book.

I'm sure I'm not doing the book justice. I'm certain I haven't gotten across the absolute (beautiful) strangeness of what he postulates, nor how his discussion of metaphor resonates in me. As I said, Jaynes develops his ideas slowly. This is purposeful, and utterly necessary to understanding even a part of what he is saying. This is not a book to be nibbled at, it is a book each bite of which must be chewed and chewed over and over in the mind to have a hope of capturing its full savour and nutritional value.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

"He [Richard Dawkins] does not quietly acknowledge the etherial [sic] quality of religion, but instead scorns it as an escape from the earthly responsibility of being a human being in the here and now (sounds a lot like Marx, actually...and Freud...).

"The ethereal quality of religion." If the emphasis there is meant to be on ethereal, I have to ask why anyone should quietly acknowledge something for which there is, and, by definition, can be, absolutely no evidence?

If religion is the emphasis, then I'd have to say that the evidence is in: it has indeed been used for centuries as an escape from responsibility and accountability. Its great miracle is to turn questions of responsibility and accountability immaterial by passing the buck to an idea of a thing without any measurable substance whatsoever. "God" is indistinguishable from magic.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

"Pequeno Vals Vienes" is the poem on which Leonard Cohen based the song "Take This Waltz." I have long wanted to do my own translation of the piece. So I have. It's below. The original, Spanish text can be found here.

update: I've done another version and posted it in the comments.

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten girls waitingfor death to sob on their shoulders;there's a forest where the doves fallto pieces every morning,and their feathers are five thousand windowsin a gallery in the museum of frost.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,Take this waltz with its lips pressed together,Take this waltz with the coin in its mouth.

This waltz, this waltz, this waltzwith its flavours of cognac and death,and the sea splashing salt on its tail.

I need you, I want you, I'll love youin the armchair with the book of the dead,in corridors with their shadows of sadnessand the irises’ scent in the dark,in our bed as pale as the moonlightwhere we dance to rhythms we inventedwith the shells of ourselves for drums.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,Take this waltz with its lips pressed together,Take this waltz with the coin in its mouth.

In Vienna there are four broken mirrorswhere the echoes of your mouth still play,there's a piano whose keys are all dyingand boys wishing to wear something blue.And the poor people tie freshly-wept garlandsto the tiles of their roofs every day.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,Take this waltz with its lips pressed together,Take this waltz with the coin in its mouth.

Oh I love you, I want you, I need you,in an attic where young people playspeedy Hungarian polkason quiet July afternoonsand sing of the lamb-white snow iris(its petals open so slowly,like your silent face in the dark).

Ay, ay, ay, ay,Take this waltz with its lips pressed together,Take this waltz with the coin in its mouth.

We'll dance it together in Vienna,this waltz disguised as a river.But there'll be a ocean of hyacinths around us,their petals and my mouth on your legs.Keep my soul in photographs and lilies,and in the dark undulations of your thighs.

And I want, my love, to leave youthis violin with the dark in its hollow,this violin with the tomb built in,this violin and the tape of this waltz.

Monday, January 08, 2007

I never heard of Eugene Lee-Hamilton before today, the poem below (found at the preceding link) made me like him immediately. It reads, to me, somewhat like You Are My Sunshine (a very, very sad song). I also hear it being sung (in my head) by an alto, or a high tenor.

Wood Song

When we are gone, love,

Gone as the breeze,

Woods will be sweet, love,

Even as these.

Sunflecks will dance, love,

Even as now,

Here on the moss, love,

Under the bough.

Others unborn, love,

Maybe will sit

Here in the wood, love,

Leafily lit;

Hearking as now, love,

Treble of birds;

Breathing as we, love,

Wondering words.

Others will sigh, love,

Even as we:

'Only a day, love,'

Murmurs the bee.

Is it just me, or do the simplicity and the sentiment combine in a poignant and clarified beauty?

Speaking of clarified, I discovered the poem while looking for John Clare's The Shephard's Calendar, which is available month by month on in the sidebar on the right of the linked page.

Oh, and here's a John Clare poem:

BALLAD.

A WEEDLING wild, on lonely lea,My evening rambles chanc'd to see;And much the weedling tempted meTo crop its tender flower:Expos'd to wind and heavy rain,Its head bow'd lowly on the plain;And silently it seem'd in painOf life's endanger'd hour.

And so it seemly did complain;And beating fell the heavy rain;And low it droop'd upon the plain,To fate resign'd to fall:My heart did melt at its decline,And "Come," said I, "thou gem divine,My fate shall stand the storm with thine;"So took the root and all.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The University of Washington has a Milestones in Neuroscience page. For some reason I've gone through and picked out years marking research on vision (I may have missed some, because I don't know quite everything; and I've inserted some links):

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable* biological interest.

A structure for nucleic acid has already been proposed by Pauling (4) and Corey1. They kindly made their manuscript available to us in advance of publication. Their model consists of three intertwined chains, with the phosphates near the fibre axis, and the bases on the outside. In our opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons:

(1) We believe that the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free acid. Without the acidic hydrogen atoms it is not clear what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the negatively charged phosphates near the axis will repel each other.

Monday, January 01, 2007

I just discovered Molecule of the Day and deoxycholic acid (a regular man is a happy man); which means I have one more site to read every day. Which is one more thing to keep me from posting regularly.